Preludes
by CatsOnMars
Summary: Lily is friends with the Marauders in their sixth year of school. She becomes concerned about Remus being gone from school so often and tries to find out the truth about him, eventually getting herself in danger. James/Lily.
1. Chapter 1

Author's Note: Not many people ever read the old version of this, but if it does look familiar that's because I posted this before in a much more crude, unedited form. I have made A LOT of changes to it that I thought were necessary, so I've deleted the old version and never want to see it again. I just hope I don't sound like George Lucas here.

Watch for a sequel to this called "Requiems." It will be a lot longer than this and, I think, a lot better.

I wrote this while I was reading Order of the Phoenix, so please excuse some inaccuracies to canon.

* * *

prelude : (1) an introductory action, event, or performance preparing for and preceding a more important matter: a musical movement introducing the chief subject (2) to lead up to: foreshadow (3) to play a musical introduction

**Preludes**

All students at Hogwarts find permanent friends by the time they enter their third or fourth year of school there, but the four Marauders had practically been eternally connected since the individual moments they all first met eachother. Now, nearly finished with their sixth year, the boys couldn't be pried apart by any force seemingly imaginable. They had also acquired popularity that undoubtably could never have been gained by any solo act.

James and Sirius were the faces that popped into mind when one thought about widely-liked troublemakers from the Gryffindor house. They had been best friends since their first year at Hogwarts, complete opposites and completely inseparable. James was everything that a well-liked young wizard should be: an amazing Quidditch player, a good student with neatly concealed intelligence, and always up for partying or a good joke. Not to mention that girls couldn't help but find him strangely attractive. He was always wild in a calm way, lying with his lean figure sprawled across the strangest place to be relaxing like on the back of one of the castle gargoyles, or simply smiling to himself almost unnoticeably while Sirius was cracking up loudly at the reaction of one of their practical jokes. And with his almost unbefitting glasses modestly hiding his crystal blue eyes, he was cute in a very quiet and comfortable way. On the contrary, Sirius was outrageous and loud about everything, his daring eyes and shoulder-length black hair just begging for girls to look at him. The fact that this year he had arrived at the train station to catch the Hogwarts Express riding a motorcycle made no false statement about his personality. Sirius was the kind of person who was horrible at consoling or even taking anything seriously, but as was reflected by his close friendship with James more than anything, he had good intentions, a good heart, and was worthy of his place in the Gryffindor house.

Their second year at the school was when they had started being seen often with Remus. This surprised many, for Remus had never before had any apparent friends. He was always keeping to himself as if he thought it was the way to be the most considerate to others, and his fox-like face was always looking down as if avoiding eye contact. People couldn't help but like Remus and always talk about him; there was a certain warmness about him, and the way he always looked tired and completely harmless like a gentle young boy was oddly calming. His unique kind of popularity that was absent of him actually having numerous friends was also helped, of course, by the mystery surrounding his absence once a month. Nobody knew that this was the cause, but when his friends had later found out his secret Sirius had conveniently turned into somewhat of a bullying figure, tacitly daring anyone to try to get past him if they wished to question Remus about his unexplained monthly illness.

Peter, by far the most unlikely member of their group, had always talked to the boys regularly. It wasn't until he showed his devotion to Remus by wanting to become an Animagus with Sirius and James that they really saw they had a true friend in him. So soon he was seen as part of the group as well, and they called eachother their own nicknames and were very secretive, and therefore were always talked about.

But there was also Lily.

Lily had dark red hair and eyes of a deep, velvety green, and one look with those eyes was as comforting as a mother's lullaby. The only way to give her appearance justice was to describe her as having the smile of an angel; genderless, beautiful in the most earthly and innocent way, and immortally kind. Even Snape, who commonly shared a mutual loathing with the four boys, could get a wave and a casual "Hello, Severus" from her if he passed her on the way into the library. Though Lily could be light-hearted, she always carried an aura of wisdom beyond her years, and no matter what she said others would take it as good advice because she just seemed to know best.

No one was really sure whether it was accurate to associate Lily with the four boys or not. She talked to all of them, but she was always nice to everyone in the school. Peter sat with her in Potions and they were used to always working together. She loved Remus to death, who confided in her sometimes and found a kind of comfort in talking to her that he could find nowhere else. Sirius, who had truly befriended her first but was not so much the type to open up to others, was usually either tickling her (often breaking the silence in a room where a lot of students were quietly studying) or giving her a ride on his back through the halls. James had met her only through Sirius and was possibly the least close to her, but Lily seemed to have the kind of effect on people so that they felt like they were friends with her just by talking to her once.

Perhaps in a way the boys, though they cared for her, unconsciously pushed Lily away. She was popular in the complete opposite way than they were, because she was well-liked by the teachers and one of the friendliest students in school while they just got attention because they made trouble. They didn't want her to be associated with them and change that. But mostly it was because they had developed an instinct to keep other people out for their own protection. For Lily did not know that Remus was a werewolf, or indeed that the other three were Animagi. She did know that James had an Invisibility Cloak and that the boys used it to sneak around the school a lot. She had even seen the map theyd made and knew about how they called themselves the Marauders, but when she'd asked about why they had such odd nicknames they had quickly changed the subject as casually as possible and never mentioned anything of the sort in front of her again.

One night Remus was minding himself quietly in the common room, playing the piano that sat in the corner as he was often doing. The piano was his own which Dumbledore had allowed to be Apparated into the school so that he could have it to play. Remus was a very good piano player for his age, and though they considered it a bit odd, the students in Gryffindor liked that he played. Whether his friends were with him lounging on the sofas with nothing to talk about, or some other students he didn't talk to were there doing homework, or he was alone in the common room, the majority of the time he could be found there playing and off in his own world. Students could hear his music from almost anywhere in the Gryffindor dormitories. Sometimes they heard his music even when Remus wasn't there, for he knew how to bewitch the piano to make it keep playing on its own. Sometimes they heard it very faintly late at night in their beds, and were unable to tell whether the music was real or in their heads.

Remus was the only one in the common room. Then Lily came in and went over to the corner right away, leaning her hip against the grand piano's side. It was like when she had first talked to Remus after only seeing him in hallways with Sirius and James before. Usually people avoided bothering him while he was playing piano, as if some other side of him would come out if he was disturbed, but Lily had kindly come over to him one night and told him he was very good. Then she'd ended up sitting next to him on the bench and asking about the songs he could play and how long he'd been learning, and then their conversation had comfortably drifted to other topics, Lily all the while amazed at how Remus could play perfectly and carry on a casual conversation at the same time. Sirius had then come in and Lily had teasingly asked him why he'd never properly introduced her and Remus before ("He's so sweet!" she'd whispered to him afterwards, and then, half-jokingly, "I never would have expected it, seeing as he hangs out with the lot of you and James").

Remus smiled at her in greeting, thinking to himself what an ugly grimace his smile was in comparison to the one she glimmered back at him. They said nothing to eachother because Lily was listening to his song, and she did until it slowly died and was over.

"What's that song?" she asked him. "I hear you play it a lot."

He looked down so that his eyes were hidden under his sandy hair even more than usual. "It's called 'Stella,'" he explained quietly. "My mum wrote it a long time ago."

"It's very pretty."

"Thank you," he said in an awkward tone, as if he wasn't sure if that was the right response, and started playing the next song that jumped out from his memory.

James came into the room. Only Lily was facing the portrait hole and saw him come in.

"Hi, James," she said.

Seeing that she was there, he smiled at her briefly and then looked away almost immediately. James was usually very confident, but he always felt weird around Lily, like he could easily look at her for a long time and had to be really careful not to stare.

"What's going on, Moony," he said to Remus.

"Not much," he replied without looking up.

They sat with little circulating conversation between them for a while, and then Remus finished his last song and dropped his hands to his lap. He yawned and turned around to sit in the other direction on the piano bench.

"Looks like the party's dead in here," James observed, looking around the common room.

"Yeah, it's getting pretty late," Lily agreed, looking at the grandfather clock. "I'm going to get to bed. I'll see you guys tomorrow."

"Goodnight," Remus and James said, waving with tired effort as she got up and left the room.

"Well." James turned to his friend. "Guys are going to start thinking they're competing with you for the prettiest girl in school."

"I think they know Lily isn't my girlfriend," Remus assured him. "And I'm sure they're more worried about Sirius."

James laughed, and then looked around to make sure no one had come into the room unnoticed. He said a little more quietly, "How much time do you have?"

"Not much," Remus answered.

"You know, I was thinking this time we should sneak into the-"

He stopped talking when someone came in, but relaxed when he saw it was only Sirius.

"What are we going to say you have now, Moony?" Sirius asked right away. "A cold again? Maybe we can dump ice water over your head tomorrow and make it look like Snape did it as a joke; that way it'll be believable when you're supposedly sick."

Remus didn't laugh, but smiled quietly.

"You don't have to say I have anything," he said. "I never asked you to blatantly lie to anybody. Everyone just figures when I'm gone that I get sick."

"We need a better story," Sirius said. "When people start reporting that they were sent to the hospital wing when you were absent but you weren't there, and we start making up stuff like them having a separate room for you or that you use floo powder to go home when you're sick...well, it's kind of unbelievable."

"Does it matter?" James said. "It's not like they're automatically going to figure out that because his story's unbelievable he must be turning into a wolf."

"Don't tell them anything," Remus said stressingly. "Don't make up any stories. You're right; they won't be able to figure it out anyway. And I don't like lying."

"Yeah," Sirius agreed. "Especially to some certain people."

It was unspokenly understood that a picture of the same girl came into all of their heads then. Remus had thought about telling Lily the truth about him as often as she had asked him about it. The thought never occurred to him that her motive for such curiosity was concern for him, but Lily had tried to get him to tell her why he was often absent from school nearly every time he'd "fallen ill" that year. She had stopped the last couple times, though, much to his relief. Telling Lily his secret would take a great weight off of his shoulders, but it was only a fleeting dream and not at all a possibility. If he did that, it could put her in danger in ways that they couldn't even fathom. Or, even worse...she might react just like the rest of the world. She might not understand.

Another student came into the common room, breaking their privacy, and they said nothing more.

* * *

Right beside the greenhouse at Hogwarts that was used for Herbology, there stood a tall wall which blocked the greenhouse from view of anyone approaching the castle from afar. Vines had grown up the wall from the greenhouse side and all the way to the bottom of the other side in the time it had been there, so that it was more green than it was the color of the rest of the castle by now.

In front of this wall was where the four friends were enjoying themselves after classes the next day and entertaining themselves by seeing who could throw a stone all the way into the lake from where they stood. They weren't alone; a group of Ravenclaw students that nearly doubled their amount were also lounging near the bank on this side of the school, and there was also Snape, accompanied by four friends of his. His and the other group ignored eachother, with the exception of an occasional glance behind a shoulder at the enemy connected with some kind of dialogue that was intended to be overheard by the others.

"The Quidditch match next week is going to be a steal," Clopin Avery, one of Snape's crowd, was commenting.

"You never know when it's us against Gryffindor," said Rabastan Lestrange. "They do have a good Seeker. They say Potter's like a god. The best Seeker their house has ever had." There was such obvious deviousness and unseriousness in his tone that it was as bad as if he had suggested that James couldn't even fly.

"They shouldn't say such things," said Snape in a low tone. "It doesn't make much of a statement about their house."

Sirius, who along with his friends could hear this conversation perfectly, had just picked up his next stone to throw toward the lake. He pulled his arm back to throw it, but as he brought it forward he turned on his heel almost in a complete half-circle.

"Oops," he said as the stone flew in the direction of the gathering of Slytherins. It went into the trail of Avery's cloak behind him, and he flashed Sirius a dangerous look.

"Don't look so sad that it missed your head and failed to put you out of your misery," James said, standing casually with his hands in his pockets.

Peter and Remus were both sitting in the grass with open books on the ground in front of them and facing away from the other two. James was the only one who saw Lily sneaking up behind Sirius, and he noticed James smirking but not saying anything.

"Ah!" Sirius said as she put her hands over his eyes, but he immediately relaxed in a state of humorous contentmentabout being currently blinded. "Now honestly, woman, how am I supposed to aim like this?"

"It's a lake, not a target," Lily said as she walked around to face him, not bothering to ask how he'd known it was her. "What is there to aim for? Just throw it as far as you can." She said this as she bent over to pick up a rock and tossed it in her hand once. Then she cast it away with a fast throw and it landed just a few feet from the end of the bank.

"I'll bet I could throw you far enough to go in," Sirius said, grabbing her around the waist from behind and lifting her up off the ground. She laughed, kicking her feet in the air, and nudged him with her elbow until he put her back down.

Remus was distracted from studying, bent over a strange-looking insect on the ground that had a large amount of forked legs. He let it crawl onto his finger from a blade of grass and stared at it curiously.

At this time Snape had attracted a lot of attention by climbing up onto the wall. He was now walking across it like a rope with his arms out at his sides to keep balance as he kept talking casually to his friends below.

"Prat," James muttered with his arms crossed, shaking his head.

Remus walked over to them to get a closer look, not wanting to miss it if Snape happened to fall down.

"What have you got there?" Lily asked him, noticing the insect that was happily crawling over Remus's knuckles.

"Ooooh," Sirius said as soon as his attention was called to it, getting an idea right away. "Let me see it."

Remus confusedly let him brush the bug into the palm of his hand, and then Sirius dropped it gently into his breast pocket and turned to go straight to the bottom of the wall. Peter was now watching, and nobody bothered asking what he was doing because from the look everyone had on their faces it was obvious nobody knew. The puzzled Slytherin students on the ground watched as he climbed up the wall by taking hold of the vines. Snape couldn't see Sirius now walking along the wall behind him once he had climbed up onto the top. Lucy Carpath yelled a warning to him as Sirius advanced behind him, but it couldn't be helped when he pulled back the neck of Snape's shirt.

Lily gasped, seeing what he was about to do, and just as soon Sirius had taken the unpleasant insect from his pocket and dropped it down the back of his shirt. Snape immediately yelled and squirmed, and a lot of girls screamed as he fell to the left but just barely caught hold of the wall so that he hung from the top instead of falling.

James and Peter were laughing and Remus was covering his mouth with his hand and trying not to. Some of the Ravenclaw students started to laugh, too, but Lily was shaking her head.

"You guys are going to put his life in danger some day," she said disapprovingly, but she had started to smile like Remus and couldn't help but find it funny.


	2. Chapter 2

One afternoon a few days later, Lily went into her Defense Against the Dark Arts class in a good mood, ready to get a big test back that the class had taken the day before. When the whole class was seated Professor Marlew picked up a stack of papers and started leafing through them. He called off names one by one for students to come up and get their tests. Lily got hers and was happily looking over her good marks, and then a moment later the teacher called, "Lupin."

Half the class turned to look for him. Then, as if he was being stupid and should have expected it, Professor Marlew said, "Oh, Mr. Lupin is absent again today."

Lily turned and looked at the empty desk where Remus should have sat. She couldn't believe it. She sighed and bent over to dig through her bookbag while the rest of the tests were being passed out and found her datebook.

She had stopped questioning Remus about why he was gone so much because she had felt the truth must be something he was embarrassed about, and for the past few months she had started collecting assignments for him to make up on those days he was absent. He had never asked her to do this, but she knew that none of the boys were organized enough to do it for him. So once again she wrote a reminder to herself on the page of that day's date: "Record assignments for Remus."

As the teacher gave out the rest of the tests Lily flipped all of the pages of her datebook back and forth in boredom. She stopped randomly at an old page to doodle on, but then something caught her eye. This page was for the sixteenth of last month, and it had written at the top, "Record assignments for Remus." Today was also the sixteenth.

As the lesson started Lily flipped through the datebook, reading all of her scribbles and notes from past days. After she had combed the last five months she sat back in her chair holding her quill under her chin, and could only stare at her writing in complete bewilderment.

* * *

Lily found the three boys gathered in the hall and easy to corner. As soon as they saw her approaching with a determined look they shot their eyes at each other uneasily as if they knew exactly what was coming. 

Despite the serious expression on her face, Lily asked very casually, "Where's Remus?"

"He's sick," James said, stopping himself from adding "again" so that it would sound like no big deal.

Lily looked at all of their faces searchingly. "Where is he really?"

"Sick, Lily," Sirius said with a trace of urgency to change the subject that came out as annoyance. "Sleeping. What is this about?"

"Did you know that Remus is gone exactly once every month? How does that happen? Don't tell me he's sick."

"He has a kind of bad condition, okay? Maybe he doesn't want the whole school to know about it."

"No, I don't think I can believe that. How does someone get sick around the same day every month? Maybe you haven't noticed, but it's always a day shortly before the twentieth."

"How do you know that?"

"I kept track! Look-" She started to get her datebook out of her bag.

She was so close to figuring it out that it was almost impossible not to show any sign of panic. Sirius was the only one who appeared to keep his cool, but "appeared" was most likely a key word in describing his state at the moment.

"Lily, cut it out," he said. There was a seriousness and roughness in his voice now that made everyone suddenly very uncomfortable, and which made Lily stop going through her bag. "You're being really nosy, you know."

"And how come you can know what's wrong with him and I can't?" she demanded, obviously getting upset now. Then her expression changed. "Or maybe there's nothing wrong with him at all, and I'm worrying for no reason. It's something bad that he's up to, isn't it? That's the only reason you'd keep it away from me. Does anyone else know about it?"

"There's nothing to know!" Sirius said. "It's none of your business anyway, all right? So just shove off."

The look in Lily's eyes changed, and she stared him down in disbelief. "You're a jerk."

"Hey, I'm not the one who brought up the subject."

"Sirius!" James had to cut in, startled by his friend's resort to utter meanness, but he didn't know exactly what to say himself.

"Fine," Lily said angrily, turning away from Sirius as if she'd decided to just pretend he wasn't there. "One of you. I want to know what's going on. Remus is my friend, too, and I think I have a right to know."

The other two said nothing. Lily stood and waited with her arms crossed. "James?"

James looked at her with a sincerely regretful expression and then stared down at the floor. "I'm sorry, Lily."

"...Peter?"

But she already knew how much she would get out of him; he remained completely silent, standing with hunched shoulders and his eyes avoiding hers.

Lily had approached them with confidence, but now just looked hurt. The others could tell that Sirius felt sorry, but Lily wouldn't look at him. Not giving any of them a glance, she turned away and said with the smallest voice, "I'll see you later," as if nothing out of the ordinary had just been said.

As she walked away they watched her with their moods sinking.

"Why don't we just tell her?" asked Peter. "She'll never give it up."

"Are you crazy?" Sirius said. "It's Remus's secret to tell. And he's too scared of what she'll think, whether or not he admits it."

"But...it's Lily," he said meltingly.

"It doesn't matter who it is. We can't loosen up on our secrecy because of a pair of pretty eyes." After saying that he shot a look at James as if to say, "That goes for you, too."

"He's right, you know," James told Peter, seeing how Sirius had aimed the comment at him and wanting to assure him that he wasn't going to let anything slip either. "If she's going to find out about it, Remus should be the one to tell her. And besides," he added, lowering his voice, "we agreed when we became Animagi that it would just be us. We agreed never to let anyone else in. We're the only Marauders, we'll always be the only Marauders. So there's no reason to tell anyone anything. It's risking too much."

"But it was all right when we showed her the map," Peter said a little challengingly; it was uncharacteristic of him.

"What is this, Wormtail?" Sirius asked dangerously. He suddenly looked a lot taller than Peter and very threatening. The halls were clearing out now as the next class time got closer, but he was talking very quietly. "Are you going to betray us? I wonder, should we have trusted you long ago when you wanted to do the unthinkable and become one of us? We broke the law. We did something very few grown wizards have ever dared to do. But what mattered was that we did it together, so that we wouldn't be alone, just like Remus is alone. That makes us brothers. That binds us to eachother and makes us a group no matter what should happen to us. Now are you in it, or aren't you?"

Before Peter could answer, James was gripping Sirius's arm. "That's enough, Padfoot," he said.

The halls were completely empty now, and James was soon pulling his arm toward the class they had next with eachother. "Catch up with you later, Wormtail," he called back at Peter as they went different ways. Sirius was still casting him a warning look as James pulled him along.

"What's wrong with you?" James hissed into Sirius's ear. "You know how Peter is. How could you talk to him like that?"

"I was just scaring him," Sirius said with a sly smile. "Making sure he was in line."

"You mean making sure he's still going to go along with whatever we say and do like some inferior person who's just there to carry your books?" James asked darkly. "I thought Peter was our friend. But apparently you have different ideas about him, after all."

"Oh, don't lay that crap on me, Prongs," Sirius said, getting irritable. "I'm sorry if I'm the only one who thinks protecting Remus is more important than someone getting their feelings hurt a couple times, whether it's Lily or one of us. And you know that Peter's a pushover. He's innocent and easy to manipulate. His intentions are good, but I think he could sign a promise in blood and break it the next day if somebody who looks trustworthy could get it out of him."

"Oh yeah? Well, I happen to trust Peter. I'd trust him with my life. And to think, you talking about all this trust and loyalty stuff. I'm amazed by you."

Sirius just snickered uncompassionately as they walked in the classroom and snuck into their desks before the teacher noticed they were late.


	3. Chapter 3

Dusk was coming fast, and the sky was streaked with red and gold like the feathers of a phoenix. Most students were in the library studying or outside enjoying the last of the daylight. But Lily was up in her dormitory with her cat, Galadriel, curled on her lap and some books that she was neglecting lying astray across the bed around her. She was unable to keep her mind on any schoolwork, and could only pet Galadriel's head and look out her window at the sunset, enjoying the quiet.

Before long the color left the sky and it was darkening to a deep blue that would eventually be a thick black sprinkled with stars. In less than half an hour dinner would be served downstairs. Lily decided to go outside and find some of her friends before it was time to go into the Great Hall. When she was going down the small staircase to the entrance of the common room, she was surprised by how little talking she heard, for there seemed to be very few people in there at the moment. But just before she appeared through the entrance she heard familiar voices whispering right by it. It was James, Sirius, and Peter. She shrunk against the wall at the bottom of the staircase and listened intently.

"He'll be back to normal really soon," James was whispering. "The sun's almost down."

"We won't have time to do anything, but the least we can do is go down there to meet him," she heard Sirius say.

"We have to wait until it's completely dark before we go," Peter whispered. "Otherwise..."

"We'll just go now," Sirius said. "We can always change when we get down there, just in case."

As Lily heard them walk across the room, she peeked out to get a look at them. James was holding a garment folded in a neat square that she recognized as his invisibility cloak. He hid it in his robes before he and the others went through the opening in the wall and left the common room.

Lily knew, somehow, that this had something to do with Remus. They had been talking about meeting some. There were other things they had been saying that she didn't understand at all, but she was determined to find out. After she went through the portrait hole she looked down at Sirius, Peter, and James going down the stairs toward the bottom floor, and she started to make her way down the circling stairs after them.

When they got downstairs Lily followed them around a couple corners and realized they must have been going outside. When they finally led her down the steps of the castle onto the grounds, it was especially difficult to keep from being seen. They started to look behind them quite a lot, making her suspect that they sensed someone following them and know for sure that they had to be up to something. She had to keep darting from bush to bush to stay in hiding, and after a while the three were a lot farther ahead of her than they had been. Luckily it was getting very dark as they walked, and there weren't any more students out on the grounds to see her looking like she was up to something even more so than the people she was following.

Eventually the three were so far ahead of her that they became only small figures in the dark, and then they turned around a corner of the school. Now out of their sight, Lily ran quickly forward until she reached the corner and slowly peeked behind it.

They were nowhere to be seen. Lily looked over the landscape in front of her two and then three times, but nothing was moving. She walked out and started to look around, all the while getting a bad feeling. She knew she wasn't supposed to be on this side of the castle. None of the students ever came over here because it wasn't a very attractive place to relax, being the end opposite of the lake. This was where the Whomping Willow was, which the students were warned never to go near.

Lily stopped dead in her tracks, her head turning to the left where the willow was. Something was wrong. The tree wasn't moving at all. She sat in a classroom every day where she could see it through the window while at her desk, and never when she'd watched it before had it behaved like a normal tree.

She cautiously approached the Whomping Willow, looking around the whole time for places that the boys could be. When she was standing right under the tree, a very surreal feeling now coming over her, she stared up at its massive branches and limbs reaching up towards the sky. Through them she could see the moon, which was almost fully round.

As her eyes traveled down to the bottom of the tree, she saw something that she had never been close enough to the tree to notice before. Two of its monstrous tree roots grew high above the ground and were stretched open to form a wide gap. As she peered through the opening it looked almost completely dark, but enough moonlight went in to show that it went far back.

Lily's mind stirred. Had they gone through here? She remembered their map of secret passageways and tunnels all over the school which they had discovered on their own. Remembering this, she was almost sure they had gone through here and gone underground. Where else could they have disappeared to?

Feeling uneasy but comforted by the fact that her friends had probably just gone this way, she put her feet through the opening and almost immediately slid through and landed about eight feet deeper on a hard floor. She got up and looked around. There was a wall in front of her and long passageways going left and right. She looked up at the opening she'd come through, and knew there nothing else to do but start walking down one side of the tunnel.

She couldn't hear anyone else there as she advanced down the right passageway, but still didn't want to light her wand in case she was still following someone. She started wondering what she would say if they discovered she had come here, and what she'd thought she would find by following them out here. She kept walking, feeling as if the tunnel could go on forever, and went farther and farther away from the moonlight in the opening, farther into the swallowing dark.

After a few minutes Lily started to feel uncomfortable. It was so dark now that she couldn't see her hand in front of her face. A little dissettled, she called out down the tunnel.

"Sirius?"

She said it so unsurely and quietly that it barely made an echo. No kind of response came. Louder than before, she yelled, "James!" Then, without knowing why, she tried, "...Remus?"

There were a few seconds of silence before Lily jumped at something she heard right in front of her. It was the sound of heavy breathing, like panting. Suddenly calling one of her friends names didn't seem like a good idea. She had a feeling this couldn't be one of them.

Slowly she reached inside her robes and found her wand in the dark. She held it in front of her and her voice was slightly shaky as she said, "_Lumos_."

Her wand lit up at the tip, and what she saw made her gasp and drop it to the floor. It was a huge dog nearly half as tall as her with a sleek black coat. Its fur was standing up on its back as it bared its teeth and growled at her, its every muscle seeming to twitch impatiently in preparation for attack. She had backed against the wall on her left when she saw the dog and was now standing pressed against it, paralyzed. When her heart had skipped a beat in surprise it seemed to have sent an electric shock jolting through her whole body, and now her legs were so numb she couldn't move them. The dog moved a step towards her, its claws tapping on the floor, and let out two sharp, terrifying barks that made her jump. She pulled back, still feeling the wall behind her, but she couldn't bring herself to run.

"Come on, Lily," she whispered to herself, closing her eyes. But then a sound attracted her attention to the other end of the tunnel, and the dog seemed to be distracted, too. It was the galloping of hooves; something was coming this way from her right.

The sound of the hooves got closer and closer and then the animal appeared and halted before her in the wandlight, a great muscular stag with its antlers nearly touching the top of the tunnel. It bowed its head to the ground as if to show Lily it wasn't going to hurt her, and as it did this she saw that the dog was backing away on her other side. She watched the dog until it almost completely disappeared from the light still coming from her wand on the floor. And then when she looked back at the stag, she saw the most peculiar sight yet.

Its shape was changing completely. Its antlers came into its head and were gone, its legs shortened, and then it changed into a dark, circular shape lying on the floor that was hard to make out in the dim light. Then some feet squirmed out into view, and she saw that it was a boy curled up under a black cloak. And then a very familiar face raised to look at her with glasses sliding down his nose and untidy hair in his eyes.

Lily stared with her eyes wide in disbelief. It didn't even seem real to say it. _"...James?"_

He was on his feet in a second and he immediately grabbed her hand. "You have to get out of here!"

He started to pull her back down the tunnel in the direction she had come. Then with a realization Lily looked back and said, "My wand!"

"Forget it!" James said, pulling her into a fast run. But before Lily looked away again she noticed that there was now something else there with the dog. The dog was growling at it threateningly, and all she saw of it was a dull metallic gleam of gray fur and a pair of haunting yellow eyes far off in the darkness.

When they were standing under the willow tree with the opening pouring moonlight into the tunnel from above them, James wasted no time before grabbing Lily's waist and lifting her up so she could climb out. She reached a hand down to help him out. As soon as they were outside again the questions that had been plaguing her mind were begging to get out.

"What's going on?"

"Not now," James said. He was running around to the other side of the tree trunk, and he came back with the invisibility cloak, which he'd hid there. He let it fall out from its neatly folded state and quickly pulled Lily close to him to drape it around both of them.

Just as soon as they were under it, a face appeared in the window of a classroom where a teacher was working late. Professor Hawkins, the Potions teacher, was looking around as if he'd heard something. He examined the scene only briefly before turning around and vanishing from the window.

"That was close. Can you hold that side?" James asked her, and she took hold of the side of the cloak she was under. They started to walk around the grounds toward an entrance to get back in. Lily looked up and saw through the cloak that it was completely dark now, and clusters of stars were shining brightly everywhere in the sky. She looked at James and saw that he was staring upward, too.

"He'll be back now," he said so quietly that she knew he was only muttering to himself.

There was so much Lily wanted to know, but she kept quiet beside James as they went inside. When they walked past the doors to the Great Hall she saw that everyone was eating dinner now. This was to their advantage, because the common room was empty when they finally got inside of it.

Lily's legs were still feeling detached and achy from the shock of what had just happened, and she sank into a couch as soon as she could reach it. James remained standing above her.

"James," Lily said after a long pause. "What-?"

"Calm down, and I'll explain everything," he told her.

She felt kind of silly that the experience had scared her so much; she knew it wouldn't have affected her that badly if she hadn't come from a Muggle family and had grown up seeing strange things like that every day. Yet somehow almost getting ripped apart by a dog seemed like something that any kind of person had a right to get a little frightened by.

"What happened back there?" she asked. "I was just looking for you and the others, because I thought you had gone down there. And all the sudden there was that big black dog..."

"Yes. That was Sirius," James said.

"Sirius? No," she said, shaking her head. "How? That dog growled at me. I was sure it was going attack me."

"He hoped you would run away and get out of the tunnel," James explained. "He was trying to protect you."

"From what?"

He looked down at the carpet and tried to find an answer, but couldn't before Lily remembered something.

"I saw something else when we were running away. It looked like another dog. Was that one of you, too?"

James nodded, but didn't say who.

She shook her head. "How can all this be? You were that stag...But that isn't possible if you're not an Animagus. And the others..."

"Lily..." He sat down on the coffee table in front of her to face her. "It...It's Remus."

She looked at his distressed face, not understanding. "Yes? What about him?"

James looked her straight in the eye as if to make her stay calm, and then came right out with it. "He's a werewolf."

She was so alarmed that she pulled back from him, her back leaning closer to the couch. "No! Remus? But he's the most harmless person I know!"

James gave a small smile. "It is kind of ironic, isn't it?"

Lily was taking this in, and understanding was starting to settle in. "That's why he's been gone every month. During the full moon. Of course." She thought about it, and now everything she'd overheard before following them made sense. They had been going to meet Remus because he was about to change back as soon as night came with a moon that was no longer full.

James explained how the Whomping Willow had been acquired to guard the entrance to Remus's escape path, and how the tunnel lead to the abandoned house in Hogsmeade said to be haunted. When he started explaining how he and the others had figured out what Remus was on their own and how they had wanted to find a way to be safe from him during his transformations, Lily's eyes widened.

"You didn't become Animagi, did you?" she asked.

"Yes. Sirius, Peter, and I all did."

"But that takes a long time to do. And it's dangerous, and extremely difficult."

"We managed it. We were younger then and really determined. But it really paid off, in ways we never imagined. As animals we've discovered places no one knows about. Everything you've seen on our map."

Lily exhaled heavily, looking down at her knees. "And no one knows about this?"

"No one but you." He smiled at her. "He wanted to tell you. It's not that the four of us don't trust you. But he was scared."

"Why?"

"Because he's the kind of person to hide from everybody. He never knows if someone will accept him for what he is or not. He almost gave up on getting into a school, but Dumbledore allowed him to come here."

They both stood up alertly when they heard the painting slide to the side, opening up the common room entrance. Sirius ran inside, followed slowly by Remus. In an instant Sirius came to Lily and grabbed her arms, holding them tightly.

"Please don't say anything," he said in a panic. "If any of the staff finds out that you were put in danger, Remus could get kicked out of the school. You aren't going to tell anybody about this, are you?"

Lily slowly shook her head. "No," she said. "Of course I won't tell anybody."

He looked almost surprised. "Nobody?"

She shook her head more surely. "No. Don't worry. Your secret is safe with me."

He smiled, and then found that he still had her arms seized tightly and clumsily let go of her. Lily looked over his shoulder at Remus, who was still standing in front of the portrait hole entrance. He looked very worn-out and sad as he always did just after a transformation, and was avoiding looking up at her.

Lily walked past Sirius and came over to him. His mouth quivered into a shy smile for a second, but then he looked away from her again. She said nothing to him, but suddenly stepped into him and hugged him as Remus had never been embraced before by anyone but his family members. It surprised him so much that the thought never occurred to him to hug her back, so he stood there awkwardly with his arms hanging at his sides as she was tightly clutching him around his middle.

"I'm so sorry," she said.

Remus looked down at her crown of fiery red hair and said softly, "What are you talking about?"

"All this time I was trying to get you to tell me," she said. "Now I understand why you didn't want to, and it's okay." She let go of him and he was finally able to look into her eyes. "But Remus, I would never...I...It could never matter to me that you-"

"No, Lily, it's all right," he said, waving his hand in front of her and brushing the subject away. For it didn't need to be said aloud. "I know."

Everyone's attention then turned to Sirius, who was vigorously shaking out his robes. "Come on, Wormtail, out with you," he said. "You miserable coward."

Something round and furry with a long ringed tail sticking out of it fell from the depths of Sirius's robes and landed on the floor. Lily's brow raised in astonishment as it uncurled to reveal itself as a plump rat. Then in a flash it had shot up faster than anyone could see and recall in great detail, and had turned into the boy Lily knew as Peter.

He looked at her in embarrassment. "...Hi, Lily."

"Oh," Sirius said, suddenly remembering something and digging through his robes. He took out Lily's wand. "Here, this is yours," he said, handing it to her. Then, as a timid second thought, he added, "...I'm sorry I scared you."

Lily smiled her mother-like, forgiving smile. She pocketed her wand, saying to everyone, "I was so stupid to follow you...That really wasn't subtle of me, I'm sorry. And I could have gotten you all in trouble."

"_We_ could have gotten in trouble?" James repeated in amazement. "Do you have any idea what could have happened to you? You gave us all a huge scare."

"It wouldn't have been that bad," Sirius said, pretending not to see the seriousness of a situation as usual. "If you'd gotten bitten, you know, then you and Remus could have kept eachother company when the rest of us can't be down at the shack."

"Or it could have been worse than that," Remus said quietly. He looked up from under his dirty blond hair at Lily. "...I could have killed you."

She smiled warmly. "But you didn't," she said. "Nothing happened to me. I'm perfectly fine because of James."

She regarded James at last and now everyone was looking at him. Lily came over to him, stood up on her toes, and kissed his cheek while he stood inanimately. "Thank you."

He scratched the back of his head and all that came out of his mouth was, "Er." Behind Lily he saw Sirius suppressing a laugh, which was enough to make him force himself together. "Don't worry about it."

"Well," Lily said, turning and addressing the whole room. "I'm going to go get some food in me, gentlemen. I encourage you to do the same." She pointed at Remus, who looked terrible. "Especially you."

They all laughed half-heartedly, in more of a relieved sighing way than an amused way, as she left the room through the portrait hole and left the four boys to look at eachother awkwardly. Remus's posture was that of a starved, freezing dog. Peter looked like he wanted to hide under something. Sirius was grinning unstoppably at James.

"You shut up," he said to Sirius before he could speak, which only made him smile more.


	4. Chapter 4

Almost two more months went by. Lily was with the boys so often that it was no longer noticeable to others if she had any other good friends. All of them were closer to her now, but especially James, who finally felt that he was a friend to her. Yet a familiar feeling of nervousness always surfaced when he was with her as if they were strangers, which was somehow a good feeling. His world sort of swirled around him out of control when she was there, but he didn't notice this; he only unconsciously missed this when she wasn't there, and would sit in class or in the dormitory feeling bothered by something without being able to place what it was that was nagging him.

One day after classes the five were all outside by the lake, James and Sirius sitting on a large rock while the others sat on the ground. James was doing homework like most of the others, digging into a chapter of Transfiguration he was required to read, while Sirius leaned back with one hand on the rock behind him and looked bored while eating an apple.

Lily laughed at something Remus had said. The two were looking over the same textbook, answering questions together. "Except that would be cheating," Lily laughed in response to whatever Remus's comment had been.

Sirius threw what was left of his apple aside and lay back so that he was curved backwards across the rock and his black hair touched the grass on the other side.

"If you're so bored then do some work, Padfoot," James suggested without hope.

"I did it in detention," he sighed.

"I'm impressed."

"Sirius, do you know the nine distinctive features of a wood nymph that make it unlike humans?" Lily asked as if to give him something to do. "We have all but one of them."

Sirius held up fingers, counting, as he listed off while still hanging upside-down off the rock, "No pupils, no organs, bad eyesight, unsymmetrical bodies-"

"Oh yeah, the symmetry thing. That's what we don't have," Lily said to Remus, and they both scribbled on their pieces of parchment.

"What are the others?" Peter asked, and Lily showed her paper to him.

Sirius sat up and kicked his book bag a foot toward them. "Mine is finished, if you want to just look at that."

Remus yawned, rolling up his parchment. "Naw, I'm done for now. I can't concentrate outside."

"No kidding," Lily agreed, though she was still writing without showing any sign of packing up her work, her radiant red hair hanging down in her face so that her eyes were hidden as she bent over her parchment. "It's such a nice day."

"Has to be hell for the fifth and seventh years," Sirius said. "Getting ready for their tests and all."

"Want to go see if anyone's in the Hall early for dinner?" Peter suggested.

"Alrighty," Sirius said, springing up onto his feet.

"Now?" James asked, looking at his watch. "Woah, it's later than I thought."

"Time flies when you're doing fun homework," Sirius said, slapping his back jokingly.

James went back to reading his chapter and didn't listen to the others as they got up to walk back into the castle. Therefore he didn't realize at first that Lily had stayed behind and was still sitting cross-legged on the ground in front of him. She tiredly put her quill down and stretched her arms above her, and James's eyes flicked up from the pages of his textbook at her and then returned to reading.

Lily stood up, though she didn't seem to be finished because she left her book open on the ground and all of her work out. She sat on the rock next to James where Sirius had sat before and looked over his shoulder at his book. "You're still in Transfiguration," she noted. "What do you want to do for a living?"

James rested the book on his lap and shrugged. "I don't know. Something with dignity to it."

"How so?"

"As in I don't want some office job at the Ministry. I want to do something that helps people and that not just any person will or can do. Maybe a job where I protect people or something."

"From what?"

"Dangerous people," he said like it was obvious. "Criminals."

"You could be an Auror."

"Yeah, I guess."

Lily laughed. "You make it sound like there's something serious to protect people from."

"You never know what could happen." James let his open book slide to the ground as he had lost the tolerance to concentrate on reading it.

"What could the world need protection from in our lifetime?" Lily asked.

"I don't want to protect the whole world. But if I can save just some people from getting hurt, that's better than typing at a desk for the _Daily Prophet_. If I can end up saving just one person who I care about then it'll be worth devoting myself to knowing how to defend people."

Lily smiled at him and he didn't understand what she was smiling about. She shook her head and said, "I never would have guessed you to be such a heroic type. Before I knew you very well, you just seemed lazy."

"Heroic?" James repeated the word. "No, I'm not."

Lily looked down and was silent for a while. Then she said a little quietly, "You could have been hurt that day."

James was caught by surprise and then realized she was talking about when he had gotten her out of the tunnel the night she found out about Remus.

"I try not to think about what could have happened to me because of how stupid I was," Lily said. "But it could have been you, too."

"I wasn't worried," James said quickly. "Sirius was holding Remus back away from you. Any of us could have changed and gotten you out."

"But you were the only one who did."

James turned his head and looked at her and something pulled at his heart and stirred in the back of his mind. She was silent now and was staring forward. She was incredibly beautiful. He hadn't really noticed it before, or at least he hadn't thought about it. Everyone said that Lily was pretty so he had always kind of taken it for granted that she was and had more importantly regarded her as being kind and sweet-tempered. But in the sunlight outside on such a gorgeous day she was nearly impossible to look away from once he had set his eyes on her.

James suddenly inhaled largely and said, "Lily."

She looked up, her expression friendly and warm. "What?"

He didn't know if he had meant to say her name. "Huh," he said thoughtfully, tracing a finger along his jaw in thought. "So weird...I feel like I've forgotten something."

Lily smiled again, but more to herself. She didn't tell him that he had said the same thing once before when he was alone with her.

A comfortable silence settled between them, and then Lily slowly reached over to James's hand that was resting on the rock and took it in hers. He looked down at this in surprise, and then a certain calmness and understanding set into him and he closed his fingers around her hand gently but securely. Before they could even make any kind of eye contact a figure came into view and walked in front of them. Snape was walking right past them toward the side of the lake.

Lily pulled her hand from his immediately and lifted it to her head, looking casual as she ran it through her hair and stared in a direction away from James. It was very awkward. Snape's eyes seemed to have been attracted to the sudden movement because he was looking at them now with no kind of readable expression, even though he appeared not to have known at first that they were sitting there when he approached the lake.

As soon as he seemed to realize what he was doing, Snape looked away again and walked a few strides toward the shore, putting his hands in his pockets and starting to kick small rocks around to keep to himself. He did not look completely unaffected by what he may have just seen between the two of them, but then again Snape could not help looking dismal by himself no matter what. Lily had tried to stop him from seeing them as they were as if she instinctively didn't want to give him anything to laugh about, but looking at him now that seemed far from a realistic concern. He had always appeared to hide in the shadows of his Slytherin friends in one way or another so that he failed to be intimidating no matter how many attemptingly threatening things he said. But the sight of him completely alone with seemingly no reason to be wandering by himself was strangely doleful and even eerie. It was almost enough to make the years James and his friends had spent in school tormenting him suddenly haunt him, but at the same time Snape kept his unfriendly appearance that was unable to gain pity, and he was reminded how much he had deserved it all.

Lily and James were apparently thinking the same thing, because she leaned to the side and whispered in his ear, "I think it's his defense mechanism."

James whispered, "What?"

"He's cruel because he doesn't want pity."

James stared at Snape in thought. They had long since given up on going out of their ways to get revenge on eachother as they often had when they were younger, with an occasional exception credited to Sirius, but James still hated him. He was cold and uncompassionate, and James had often wondered why Lily would bother being decent to him.

"He doesn't thank you for being understanding," he said quietly to her.

"But you could leave him alone," she said, "even if you don't like him."

"Talk to Sirius, not me," James excused in a somewhat childish and unmindful manner.

Lily gave him a chastising look which he ignored, but her expression softened as she seemed to admit to herself that he was right about her preaching to the wrong person. She stood up and collected her things from the ground, and James retrieved his book as she said, "See you later," and walked off to go into the castle and eat dinner. And just like that it was as if what had just happened when they were sitting there together hadn't happened at all. A delicate, stolen moment that was so fragile that it had ceased to exist with the smallest interruption.

When James looked back up, briefly, at where Snape was standing, he had moved farther to the left of where he was sitting on the rock. He got the strangest feeling that he had been very aware of them the whole time despite looking away, like an eye in the back of his head had watched them. With this uncomfortable thought in mind, leaving him to himself suddenly seemed like a good idea, so about ten minutes later James stood up and headed for the castle.


	5. Chapter 5

One weekend in the common room, Remus was playing a light-hearted tune on the piano and the other four were all goofing off and enjoying having no work to do.

Sirius had grabbed Lily and was pulling her around by the waist in a clumsy imitation of a tango. Everyone laughed uncontrollably as he spun Lily around and then dipped her far back so that her hair almost touched the carpet. Sirius looked just as pretty as her, so when they danced around in such an unmasculine display the result was quite comical.

The only one who wasn't laughing, but simply forming a small smile while keeping his face pointed downward, was Remus. A full moon was approaching once again. Sirius always seemed almost excited when this observation was lingering unspokenly between the four of them. But for Remus it meant something completely different than it did for the others, and he always somewhat spaced himself apart from them at these times, as if he was feeling especially left out.

When Sirius finally settled down, Lily gave some final laughs as she brushed her now messy and unparted hair out of her face, but didn't give much care to fixing it again. She sank tiredly into a deep and large red chair that was beside the sofa as Sirius sat down with James. Remus's music became calmer and slower. Peter, who looked the most tired out of everyone there, said a short goodnight to everyone and made his way up the stairs to the dormitories.

Sirius nudged James's arm. "So I heard Professor Constantine busted you, eh?"

"Yeah," James sighed. "I was reading your notes in class."

"Sorry about that," Sirius said sincerely. "What's the deal? We're supposed to get in trouble together, you know."

James smiled. "Yeah, like the good old days," he said fondly. "Well, it wasn't the first time it's happened, so I have an hour detention."

Sirius winced. "My sympathies, Prongs."

James looked at him, waiting for him to realize his point. "I have to serve it on Monday."

"But you have Quidditch practice, don't you?"

"Yes. So I have to go and do it later at night." He stressed the last part of his speech in case Sirius was having trouble seeing his meaning.

But Sirius already understood. "Oh. That's rotten luck. You told Remus?"

James shook his head.

"Hm. It'll be no fun without you."

He expected just as much from Sirius, for him to treat it so lightly. He always acted like it was about having fun when they roamed the grounds as animals with Remus. And it was, but it was also all they could do to keep their friend from going insane in his other form. Even though the others would be there on Monday night, James felt like he should have been more careful about leaving his schedule open.

Remus started playing the piano part to a sad love song which Lily knew the words to. As if with no premeditation, she started to softly sing along to it while curled up in a relaxed position in the chair. Suddenly it was like she was singing the room to sleep; as soon as she accompanied the song everyone became silent. During a pause in the vocal part Lily stood up to go sit next to Remus on the bench. James had never heard her sing before. Her voice didn't carry very far but it was pretty and comforting, like the sound of running water. When the song was finishing, Sirius nodded at James in subtle communication of a "goodnight" and then stood up to go up to bed.

Remus stopped playing and Lily lifted a hand to the keys and played some randomly as she talked. "You have to have everything, don't you, Remus?" she asked him kindly, but not seriously. "A shack all to yourself, a Whomping Willow tree to guard your secret passageway, and a grand piano in the common room. You know this is probably the only thing that's ever been Apparated here since the school first opened? "

He smiled. "Dumbledore has been very kind to me." There was no trace of realization in his voice and it was clear that he already understood this very much.

Lily stood up and said goodnight to both of them before leaving. Then James went over to stand by the piano and explained to Remus that he wouldn't be able to go down with him and the others to the shack the night after the next.

"Oh," Remus said simply when James was done telling him. "Well, that's all right. Pretty bad for you, though. You have to go to detention and then be alone around here the rest of the night. Well, I guess if you'rereal cleveryou might be able to find us, if you want to risk sneaking down the tree without the cloak. But in hopes that we're a little better at hiding than that, I kind of hope you won't."

James laughed. "I will be able to go the next day before you change back, though. We'll leave right after school, cause I don't think any of us have anything to do."

Remus nodded. Then, with a quick afterthought, he added, "Oh, Lily will be here. So you won't be completely by yourself."

"Yeah," James agreed, but he didn't really acknowledge the idea. It was typical of Remus to turn the concern to someone else, but he wasn't exactly worrying about what he would be doing that night.

* * *

The next day was Sunday. The boys and Lily finished their homework early in the day and had the rest of it off to be outside. They found themselves at the side of the lake in front of the greenhouse wall, once again accompanied there by numerous other groups of students and Snape's Slytherins. It was a particularly large group of Slytherins, and today Bellatrix and Narcissa Black were there.

For the first twenty minutes or so Snape and his friends managed to ignore them. Sirius entertained himself by climbing up a tree to retrieve a scarf that was stuck in the branches. On the way up his right shoe fell off and landed in between two braches to get stuck just like the scarf. Sirius swore and tried to climb down to get it back, but only fell out of the tree in the process.

He hit the ground and groaned and the others laughed as he got back up on his feet. He stared up at his shoe that was in the tree just high enough so that he wouldn't be able to reach it. "Well, now what?"

"If you give somebody a boost up...," James offered.

"Yeah," Sirius said, grinning, and signaled to Lily to come over to him. "Lily, you're light. Get over here."

Rolling her eyes, Lily walked over and was picked up by the waist by Sirius and lifted high up toward the tree branches. She stretched her hand up and knocked the shoe from the branches so that it landed with a defeated thump on the ground below.

"Yay!" Sirius said in a fake, high-pitched voice as he retrieved his shoe and started to put it back on his foot.

Several students had been watching in mild amusement, and now Bellatrix crossed her arms smugly and called to her cousin, "I'd wash that shoe now if I were you."

Not everyone got the point of her comment, but Sirius understood her meaning right away, and it immediately put him in a not-so-cheery attitude. "Oh, shut up, Bella," he shot back, spitting out her name in pure disgust.

Bellatrix laughed. "You really are pitiful. What an embarrassment to the family. You already amount to nothing as it is, and now you're hanging around with people like her."

"Oh, just say it," Snape chimed in suddenly. "They know Evans is a dirty Mudblood-"

"You watch your mouth!" Sirius snapped as a lot of people gasped, his temper now fueled to a much more dangerous level. Lily was silent, looking like she very much wanted to sneak away. Remus was attempting to calm everyone down.

"Now, both of you-" he started.

"And what are you going to do to me if I do say that again?" Snape asked of Sirius challengingly. "Wave your dirty shoe in my face that that Mudblood touched? What about you, Potter?" He turned to James defiantly, whose eyebrows were narrowed in an expression of loathing. "You going to let me talk about her like that? If I knew I could get you this mad just by saying that I'd have done it a long time ago."

"Shut. Up." Sirius said it slowly through gritted teeth, practically vibrating with contained rage.

"Guys," Lily sighed in exasperation. "Please. Just ignore him. I don't want to cause any-"

But Snape pounced on her before she could finish, interrupting with, "You can shut up and stay out of it, you filthy-"

Then he used a word that merited some kind of reaction from everyone who was watching. James made a move as if it go after Snape, though he had done it unconsciously, and he never got the chance to do whatever he was about to do to him because Remus got between them and Snape first. Sirius had lunged forward more than James had and probably would have hurt Snape, but Remus was now holding him back and having to use all his strength to do so.

"Now, stop this! Ugh!" Remus groaned, looking about to buckle from the force with which Sirius was pushing against him. "Settle down, all of you!"

Meanwhile Lily was shouting at Sirius for him to stop but was ignored.

"Don't be such a girl, Remus!" Sirius shouted at him angrily. "What about you? You're a prefect! Do something about him!"

"If you don't cut it out now I'll give _all_ of you detentions. Now give it up."

Sirius backed off and the Slytherins distanced themselves from the others to be the way they had been before. The five walked back to the castle to get away from them, and on the way Remus had to put a hand on James's shoulder and tell him to calm down. He hadn't even realized that his shoulders were stiffened and his hands were clenched into fists at his sides. He relaxed and looked over at Sirius, who appeared to be fully recovered from the incident but was obviously hiding any emotion he was feeling, which he was always good at.

It was Sirius's hatred for Snape that had made him react to it the way he did; the fact that he was attacking Lily had just given him a reason to get mad at him. His cousin being there hadn't helped calm his temper, either. It hadn't really been out of the ordinary for him, but James couldn't remember ever being so mad at Snape in his life. He had been too angry to even say anything back to him, and now that made him feel even more angry.

When Lily finally talked to them again it was to say she would see them at dinner before going up to the dormitories, and her tone of voice was blank. But the way she didn't say anything scolding to Sirius or the rest of them showed that she was thankful.


	6. Chapter 6

Author's Note: Well, here we are. The last chapter. Thanks to all of you who took the time to read and review this. Don't forget to keep an eye out for the sequel, "Requiems." I have about ten chapters of it already written so I'll probably be putting it up very soon. It takes place near the end of the Marauders' last year, will have much more of a love-story angle (and not just concerning J/L), will focus a lot on Sirius this time, and is mostly about the negative after-effects of...well, what happens in this last chapter. Enjoy.

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At 7:40 on Monday night James was at the Quidditch field, flying through the night air high up on his broomstick. He often liked to go out at night and practice all by himself at the field, now that he was old enough to be allowed to do so. James loved Quidditch, but felt that flying by himself was a completely different experience than flying in a Quidditch match; it didn't feel like racing or a competition but more like pure freedom, like what flying is supposed to feel like. The castle also looked extremely beautiful from far away at night. It always reminded him of the first time he had seen it, crossing the lake toward it in the boats as a First Year.

James pulled his broom upward until he was hanging upside-down with his legs curled up around it and one hand holding the broomstick. He used his free hand to dig into his robes for his wand, which he lit for a moment to be able to read the time on his watch. He sighed, wondering how long the others were going to still be wandering about the grounds and the streets of Hogsmeade before they came back. Immediately after school he had had Quidditch practice and then had to go to Professor Hawkins's class for detention, so he hadn't seen Sirius, Peter, and Remus since classes and was starting to wish he had some familiar friends to talk to. If he had to hang around for one more hour by himself he thought he was going to die of boredom.

James flew down to the ground, landed softly on the grass, and stared up at the full moon as he walked back to the school. On his way back he spotted some figures in the distance of other students that were still outside. Once he was inside he could hear loud conversation inside the Great Hall; most of the students were done eating dinner but were still in there studying with their friends or otherwise socializing and being openly unconstructive.

He went upstairs to the portrait hole entrance and went through it with his broomstick over his shoulder. As soon as he was inside the common room he noticed a movement over in front of the fireplace and a flash of red hair.

"James?" Lily asked in surprise, turning to see him where she sat on the sofa. "What are you doing here? You and the others are back already?"

"No. I didn't go." He walked over to the sofa in front of the fireplace as he explained. "I had to serve detention and couldn't make it."

"Couldn't they have waited for you?"

"Sure, if they wanted to lose track of Remus," he answered. "Probably would have been okay, but we don't like him to be alone when he changes. Never know what could happen or what he'd do differently than usual." James looked around to make sure there wasn't anyone else in a hidden place in the common room, as their conversation would sound a little peculiar, but found that there was no one. He noticed for the first time that there was very quiet music playing - he was so used to it that it hadn't seemed odd - and when he looked over at the grand piano he saw the keys pushing down on their own as if played by invisible fingers. "Everybody's gone."

"Yeah," Lily said. "They're all in the Great Hall looking at Jeffrey's new iguana. I got bored with talking to people, so I came up here."

James observed her briefly and found that she wasn't studying or doing any work. In fact, she had nothing with her, but was simply sitting with her hands in her lap calmly.

"You're looking a little lonely," he said honestly. But perhaps he would have looked a little strange as well to anyone who had seen him flying on his broom all alone at night, he thought right afterwards.

As if reading his mind, Lily eyed his broomstick. "Did you have detention and Quidditch practice, too?"

"Yeah," James said, putting his broom against a chair and then sitting next to her on the couch. "But I had practice first. I was just flying around." He thought for a moment, and then began, "Um...Lily, I'm sorry about...you know, yesterday."

"There's no reason for you to apologize," she told him.

"Maybe not. Well, you'd think not. But it was just kind of strange how Snape jumped on the first opportunity to start offending you like that. Usually anything he says or does is against us and he leaves you alone. I just kind of got the feeling he was trying to get me worked up."

"You?" Lily asked. But right after she said it some realization, as if that she had said something that shouldn't be spoken aloud yet, caused her to ignore the idea. "But that doesn't make it your fault."

"Well, anyway, I'm sorry we made a big commotion over it. I know that's not how you wanted us to deal with it. We were just making things worse."

"But that was just Sirius."

"Would have been me, too, if Snape had been standing just a couple feet closer."

"Alright," Lily started in a new unserious tone, "next time, then, I won't be as easy on you."

He smiled. "Sounds fair to me."

Lily turned her head to look forward and her slightly curled hair moved a little about her neck and shoulders with the movement. James felt something lingering inside of him, as if wanting to get out. He knew he had felt it before. There was something about being with her. She was so lovely but not in the same way as other girls he knew, because it did not make her intimidating at all. That made everyone want to be with her, talk with her. With him it was not any different.

But no, that wasn't it. There was something else.

Something...

James realized that he hadn't said anything in a long time, but as soon as she turned to him and he looked into her face again he didn't feel weird about it, and everything was all right. The flickering light from the fireplace delicately illuminated all of her shapely features; a curl resting against her shirt, the gleam of her emerald eyes, the smoothness of her neck. She stared at him for a moment and when her eyes raised to his untidy dark hair she smiled as if she had never noticed it before, and raised her hand to brush a stringy forelock out of his face.

"It kind of does that when I've been flying," James apologized with a laughing smile.

Then there was a stretch of silence again. But it didn't feel like silence. At every moment it felt like they were talking to eachother, even when they weren't speaking words. It was such a comfortable feeling that James almost preferred the silence to talking to her. Everything about the moment was so warm, just as much because he was this near to her as it was because they were near the fire.

He was for once fully conscious of himself as he said, "Lily..."

She did not say anything but responded with her eyes, gazing into his unbreakingly and waiting.

The flames in front of them crackled and burned quietly. James didn't feel himself leaning toward her. It was a little like falling very, very slowly, what came over him then. It was happening to her, too.

The distance between their faces was closing as slowly as it takes sunlight to fade to darkness at dusk. Their eyes closed gently and a black curtain fell over both of their minds and they drew closer and closer...

Then the portrait hole slid open.

Lily and James opened their eyes in surprise and whipped around in the couch to see a very troubled-looking Peter rushing into the room behind them.

"Peter?" Lily said with a concerned voice.

"Hey, Wormtail," James greeted. "What's wrong?"

"It's Severus," Peter panted, catching his breath from running all the way there. "He's...Padfoot did something..."

"Severus?" Lily repeated the name, immediately becoming very alert at the mention of Snape. "What about him? Where's Sirius?"

"He's down there," Peter said as Lily and James both stood up, and they soon realized he was ignoring her second question. "Snape. He went down there."

"Wormtail, down where?" James asked, raising his voice a little in frustration with not understanding Peter's point.

"There, Prongs," Peter said gravely. "_There_. Down the passageway. Under the willow tree."

There was one second of silent realization, like the ticking of a countdown clock stopping right before a bomb explodes. Then James exclaimed in a voice twice as loud as before, "What!"

As the three of them ran downstairs to get outside, Peter tried to explain everything to James and Lily very quickly. "We had just changed back and come out of the tunnel, and we were about to put the cloak on but I said to wait because I saw Snape coming around a corner."

"What was he doing there!" James asked in disbelief. "No students go to that part of the grounds, it's not allowed."

"I don't know, but he came and walked right by us, and Sirius knew he had spotted us there and was just trying to find something to get us in trouble for. Of course the tree wasn't moving because it was still stunned and this got his attention. So Sirius told him how we had made it do that. And then he pointed out the opening to the tunnel to him and dared him to go down there."

"He...what?" James was so startled that his pace of going downstairs was slowed for a moment.

"Yeah, and Snape seemed so curious about the situation so I think he knew he would actually do it. And then I guess he thought it would be funny to mess with his head a bit, because before Snape went down there he disappeared under the cloak as he was looking away for a second."

"And now he's gone," James assumed.

"Yes. I don't know where he...He could be anywhere," Peter said exhaustedly.

James cursed and covered his forehead with his hand. He couldn't believe his friend had gone this far. Had he been in a bad and especially reckless mood and been hiding it well all day? Was he still mad at Snape because of what had happened the day before? Had he just been playing with the idea so he and Peter could have a laugh, or had he really believed that Snape would do it if he told him to?

As they ran across the school grounds, not even worrying about getting caught in the forbidden area near the willow tree, the horrible possibilities were racing through all of their minds. Snape attacked. Snape bitten and turned into a werewolf. Snape killed. And Sirius and Remus both knowing they had done it to him and having to live with it for the rest of their lives.

Once they had reached the tree, James looked around and shouted. "Sirius, you moron! Where are you! Come out so I can throw you to Moony myself, you idiot!"

"James," Lily said in a quiet, attemptingly calming voice. "I'm sure he's not here. He probably left and doesn't even know if Severus went into the tunnel or not."

James turned to Peter hopelessly. "How far down do you suppose he is by now?"

The look in Peter's eyes turned even more fearful than before. "...I'm sorry," he said pathetically. "I wasted a lot of time running around calling for Sirius myself...It's been at least fifteen minutes. Maybe twenty."

A terrible silence went over the three of them then, and the complete stillness of the tree was now especially unsettling. James walked right up to it and halted before the gap in the roots that opened to go down into the tunnel. A strange change appeared to go over him then. Standing there completely still he suddenly looked older than usual. His careless and jocular exterior was suddenly shed as he stood regarding what was before him, knowing what he must do.

"...I have to go down there," he said quietly.

Peter's eyes widened. "Are you crazy?"

"James!" Lily cried desperately. "No. It's way too dangerous. We have to go get help."

"And then they'll find out everything and all of us will get expelled, Remus included," James said, turning around to face her and Peter. "If Snape is even still alive by the time they get there."

Lily came forward to him, her expression terrified. "Change. You have to. If you're a stag, then Remus can't-"

"How is a stag going to tell Snape to turn around and get out of there? I can't let him find out I'm an Animagus."

"Who cares if you get in trouble!" Lily demanded, grabbing his arms. "If you don't, both of you could just get hurt-"

"It took us three years to do it, Lily! If the school finds out about any one of us being an Animagus, it'll ruin everything we worked for. I can't let the others down like that, even if Sirius-"

"James. Please." The way she was holding his arms so tightly, not wanting to let him leave, made him go quiet. Suddenly the selfishness of it hit her in the face; she did not want to let him go, she couldn't. But there was nothing she would be able to do to stop him from doing the right thing, and she knew that she loved him for it. But she would have given anything to not have to realize this at a moment that he was about to go risk his life.

"Peter!" Lily turned her head to look at him. "Tell him he can't do it!"

But Peter just stood there and lowered his eyes to the grass, having nothing that he could possibly say to change things.

"Why do you have to?" Lily said in almost a whisper, facing James again but not looking up into his face. "It isn't fair. You don't even like him. You know he would never do the same for you...Why do you both have to be put in danger?"

But there was no stopping it. This had to happen, for reasons they didn't even understand. She looked up to meet eyes with him, and his expression softened in a way Peter had never even seen before. "Lily, don't look at me like that...I'm doing this."

There was a brief moment of acceptance, and then Lily pulled him forward, stood on her toes, and kissed him. It surprised James at first but then his shoulders relaxed and sunk a little, and for just those few seconds it was easy for him to forget the magnitude of what he was about to do. It was as if those angel wings that she had to have somewhere suddenly spread out from her back and wrapped themselves around him, protective and hopeful.

She broke away and gave him a quick push toward the tree. "Go," she said. "Hurry."

He backed away from Lily and Peter and then turned around and quickly disappeared down into the dark opening at the bottom of the tree without looking back. Lily did not feel as scared as she had just a minute ago. She knew he would come back out soon unharmed, and time would stand still until then. For now she understood that this was a beginning and not an end.


End file.
